It won’t be long until Distorted is available for sale! Transmundane Press has put together a collection of short stories about monsters, gods, and mortal struggles. The anthology includes To Sing Which Tune, my story about sirens on modern Earth. It’s a bit darker than my usual works!

Today is cover reveal day — but that’s not all! Reading Addiction Virtual Book Tours also has excerpts of some of the stories, and personal factoids about us contributing authors. And don’t miss the giveaway raffle at the bottom of the post!

I always forget how effort-intensive it is to copy-edit a book. Whew. I’m still working on this pass of Render, and hoping to smooth out all the typos and phrasing tweaks by the end of the week. But at least rereading my own work is letting me enjoy the little moments again.

In the drafting process, I wrote a lot of odd conversations between Rue and Felixi. Their gradual, uneasy friendship meant that they didn’t always get straight to the point when they talked. They’d go on tangents sometimes, or tell jokes that fell flat. Bridging the gap between them took some awkwardness and vulnerability from both parties.

Some of these scenes made it into the final Render story. My favourite is what I think of as The Weird Egg Conversation.

But still examining his cuticles, Felixi spoke, clear and even as lake water:

“I made plans before I was born. I decided I was going to run the moment I was free of my eggshell. I didn’t know where to. Likely because I had no idea what a place was, other than the singular place inside my egg. Which was too cramped and dark to be doing any running.”

Rue watched the droop of his eyelids, and sensed the angle of his feathers in the air; she expected a grin and saw no trace of one.

“You … didn’t want to fly?” she asked.

“Not at all. I couldn’t even imagine such a thing.”

It could well be the truth. Every flighted creature in the land learned its legs before its wings, as far as Rue was aware.

“That’s curious,” she said. “Aemetkind don’t think much of anything before we’re born. Not even for a few days afterward. I imagine because there’s no air inside the womb — we don’t have a membrane to hold one of those bubbles of air, like the ones in the end of an egg? It takes a certain quantity of air to wake a child up.”

“Is that so?”

Keep talking, her innards knew. Felixi’s tail drifted nearer to the ground, and nearer, like he might sit and the stories might go on. What a gift pressed into Rue’s hands, these nettles to be held carefully.

“I think so,” she said. “The earliest thing I remember is someone saying that I looked plenty alert for a two-day-old child. Those were the words he said: plenty alert. It turned out to be my father saying so… And ferrin must be the same way. A ferrin friend of ours said his first memory is of opening his eyes, and that takes at least three days.”

“Hmf. Quite a lot of difference, but we’re all full of life, aren’t we.”

It was true. Rue hummed.

Dancing his gaze around — anywhere but on Rue and whatever it was she embodied — Felixi took a hitching breath. He said, “If it’s such a frightfully large deal, I’ll take your bargain.[“]

I don’t know, I just like the stranger-than-fiction feel of this scene. Pre-natal consciousness in the various Aligare peoplekinds? Heh, wow. It’s one of those bizarre things you bring up with someone, then you both chuckle because how the heck did you get on this subject? But here you are talking about it. That’s the kind of unexpected honesty that sways Felixi’s opinion of Rue. Render wouldn’t be the story it is without stuff like The Weird Egg Conversation.

I’m focused right now on Render, the story of Aligare where a remote aemet village is beset by wolves. It’ll be out sometime soon, likely in March. In the meantime, have a sample of the story! This is a scene from Chapter 4, in which Rue the aemet seeks out the enigmatic hunting korvi, Felixi of Velgarro.

This excerpt is from a work in progress. The final version of Render, a story of Aligare might be slightly different.

Near the end of a third hour — when the daylight was richly gold — another shape pressed into Rue’s awareness. Too far off to gauge its size properly — and Rue told herself twice not to assume a bounty ahead of the harvest. But as heartbeats clicked past, she grew more sure of her sense. The shape was too large and too many-limbed to be anything but a korvi, his wings slicing the air like well-honed knives.
He flew within seeing distance, a speck gliding through the clouds. He was yellow-feathered and gold-skinned, his pale limbs and white belly blending with the cloud-streaked gold of the sky. Difficult to see unless one was already looking for him. That was a useful way for a hunter to be hatched, Rue supposed with her stomach turning slowly over.
Wheeling on the wind, he turned his long-jawed face turned toward her. Impulse clamouring inside her, Rue raised both arms and waved. If there was a particular wave to call a korvi down from the sky, she wasn’t familiar with it, but her clumsy motion seemed to work. He came closer on unhurried wingbeats, beating air downward before he held his broad wings steady and dropped to the meadow grass. Air rushed away and settled.
This looked like the Felixi of Velgarro described by aemet kin. He was thick-built in the shoulders, muscular like Rue supposed a hunter would be. He straightened from his landing — straightened tall, holding his horns skyward and turning stone-hard eyes to Rue.
His throat moved as though he meant to speak. Nothing came out for an instant; he swallowed, frowned, and tried again. “Something you want?” he asked in a rasping voice.
Like he hadn’t spoken in days. Like he was a wild creature himself.
But he was right, there was something Rue wanted. “You might say that. You’re Felixi of Velgarro, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” He cocked his head, eyeing Rue. “And you’re another Aloftway pup asking me to trade, hmm?”
She blinked; the sensation of skipped pleasantries slid roughly away. “I … yes. Our leaders request your help in hunting wild quarry.”
“Leaders? I thought you had a mage in your little Aloftway. A mage.”
The pierce of his gaze made Rue hesitate. It didn’t truly matter whether a community chose a mage full of casting arts, or a clever-tongued leader, or some patchwork of the two; it was was a triviality of words and surely even a hunter knew that.
“It seems to me that we have one mage and one leader,” Rue ventured. “One is better with casting than the other. Does it matter?”
“No.”
The hunter didn’t visit village folk because he had an arrogant way about him, said Rue’s innards in a sour voice. Arrogant wasn’t even the right word, not an exact match to the cross-legged korvi standing before her.
“At any pace, are you interested in trading?”
“Not particularly.”
What a difficult nut to crack. “There’s nothing you want? I was told to offer you anything the village might provide …”
“Anything? Well, that’s a mote more interesting than last time.” Felixi sat on his braced tail; he sighed hard, like chiding himself. “Fine and well, I’ll part with a moment of my time. You are?”
Keep up with him, said the proud spark in Rue’s heart. Speak up responsibly. Like the mage herself would.
“Rue Tennel. Nearest hand to the mage, daughter of the tinctoring arts.”
“Right, then. Rue. I’m Felixi of Velgarro, as you already know. Hunter of creatures.” He didn’t flick his wings open, not even a featherwidth. He only nodded. “Has Aloftway grown anything worth bothering with? No barley, I don’t care for animal feed.”
“By a chance, we don’t grow any.”
“Truly a chance?”
Rue’s thoughts tripped again, but she thought better before her mouth could fall too far open. “No,” she admitted. “The farming folk just didn’t want to waste their casting on crop that doesn’t care for mountains. But we do grow white beans and spinach, and garden herbs, and I can forage for any particular forest plant you’d like.”
“Feh,” Felixi huffed, but he paused like thought in the very same breath. Plans formed behind his eyes while they flicked over the plains grass.
Rue couldn’t help looking better at him, in this moment. Scars stood out on his shoulder and arms, white against his yellow, raised lumps against the air. He had been injured more than his dragonkind resilience could match — and he hadn’t had a healer to knit his wounds, either. A rope-thick scar led up his thigh, under his tattered pants. His cargo pouch was all but empty, knotted around itself. But his waistband carried a second brown item, one Rue gradually identified as the sheath of a knife — the largest she had ever seen. He must have led a frightful life, Rue thought.
“I’ll take nuts,” Felixi decided. He stiffened at his own words, air sliding under his slight-bristling feathers. “Hazelnuts, acorns, I’m not particular about which kind. Or honey. Or some preparation of both.”
“All right, I’ll bring a bushel basket,” Rue said, while her insides chilled at the thought of filling it. “Would that be enough for a large creature?”
“Deer? Nurl? Something else?”
“It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s a food creature. We’re expecting new arrivals and they’ll want meat.”
Curiosity raised Felixi’s brow, but he kept any questions firmly held behind his teeth. “It’ll likely be a nurl. Which’ll take me a day, so count the hours and don’t be late. Until then.”
And he opened his wings, bunched powerful legs and tail, and sprang into the air. Felixi of Velgarro was flapping away before Rue could believe her senses.
He was thoroughly odd, and more than that, he stirred a fear Rue couldn’t put words to. A bone-deep wondering if she should flee. Turning to the forest, back toward Aloftway, she walked and sorted her thoughts into piles. She supposed the sheer fact of a wild-wandering hunter was unsettling: this was a person who dove onto wild beasts like a wild beast himself. It wasn’t natural. Not in Rue’s sense of the term, anypace — where it was fair enough to raise a food animal and care for it, in exchange for a terror-free death.

She had helped Mother clean meat, once, in old Ordiny village. They had been gifted a lump of horse meat to be made into stew, and it had put a similar fear in Rue’s belly — the awareness that this moist red mass used to be part of a creature.
Why was it from a horse, she had asked in small voice?
This horse got hurt, Mother explained. She picked up a short-bladed knife, looked to the meat and hesitated. It had wrenched its leg and it wouldn’t have lived anypace. So the kindest thing was to release it from pain, then make use of what it left behind.
Rue had wondered why the horse hadn’t gotten a funeral, like other friends of aemetkind. But she supposed horses weren’t a personkind. Maybe they had other ways of returning their plant-element spirits to goddess Verdana’s care. Some other path through the whole wide land. Legends swarmed in Rue’s memory, the tales of ancient times and gods deciding what would feed what — the tales she wished would fit together more neatly.
She considered asking about it, but Mother was making her uneasy face. The knife parted meat, drawing a wedge of air downward.
She could do it, Rue offered. If Mother watched over her.
Turning a smile toward her, Mother said that would be fine. Here, Rue. It would be a great help if she did.

That horse, Rue understood as she grew older, had likely been helped to its death by the same friend who fed and groomed it each day. Or at least an odd-job korvi with a calm temperament. Like how Judellie had taken care of the caravan horse limping too badly to be sent back down the mountain. That was a far measure away from Felixi of Velgarro, some thorny fellow who dropped sudden and fierce out of the sky. Someone who demanded a bushel of food to even think of helping. That was the crux of it, Rue thought as she paused in the forest: Aloftway was asking Felixi for help and he grudged it. He must have had his reasons — but who had reasons so chill, so sharp of tooth?
Maybe, she thought with a swell of embarrassment, she was just too young an adult to take seriously. She simply didn’t have the air of aged knowledge that a family leader would — and even if she did, aemets only lived for a productive forty years. Rue wondered suddenly what Felixi had guessed her age to be, whether he had decided her a leader. If only she could sense that truth.

Returning focus to the forest around her, Rue searched the air for serrated hazelnut leaves. She wouldn’t know the depths of life today, or tomorrow, either. But if she followed Felixi’s mist-veiled wishes, perhaps he would be easier to work with next time.